While everyone else was busy doing their part, 006 kept sprinting laps around the outer deck. He had no idea what he'd done to personally offend the Xerun, but despite every effort to keep a low profile, he kept drawing alien aggression like a magnet.
Beside him, the mustached Macs was watching with considerable admiration. Look at this guy. What insane luck—he keeps clearing these laser shots with centimeters to spare. How is that even possible?
It wasn't superhuman reflexes, exactly—but it wasn't dumb luck either. At his level of neural reaction speed, a focused agent could register and dodge one or two shots from a conventional pistol at around thirty meters. A lot of veterans could manage that. The trick wasn't outrunning the bullet; it was outrunning the trigger finger.
The catch was that all of that applied to conventional firearms. Not laser weapons.
The only reason 006 had made it this far—ducking and weaving, somehow surviving each near-miss—was Bella running invisible interference behind the scenes. She wasn't going to sit back and let a former subordinate get killed right in front of her. She'd used everything in the toolkit: Mind Blast, a Slow spell thrown on the pursuers, and when it got desperate, even the Yata Mirror.
Bella honestly couldn't figure out what was drawing every Xerun on the deck straight to 006. But the more he ran, the more they seemed to mark him as easy prey, and the more they marked him as easy prey, the more they chased him. A deeply stupid feedback loop.
What made it worse was that the Xerun were remarkably single-minded about it. Their limited cognitive capacity apparently didn't allow for mid-chase recalculations. More than once, Bella watched an alien take a killing blow—spear through the neck—and still fire a parting shot at 006 on the way down.
The battle was messy and disorganized. No one was coordinating with anyone else. But with each person drawing on their own hidden capabilities, they were grinding through the enemy. Having 006 out front acting as an involuntary aggro magnet made the whole operation considerably smoother—even Charlie managed to rack up a confirmed kill in the chaos.
Up ahead, the fighting was fierce. Back here, it felt almost casual.
The Xerun commander must have sensed something was off. Three successive waves were dispatched to punch through the civilian line.
They fed them in one batch at a time. Each batch got annihilated.
"For the love of God—can anyone come reinforce me?!" Sam Wilson's voice crackled over the comm.
The women stayed. The men went to help.
Barbara always thought of herself as one of the men. She grabbed her gun and went too.
006 remained exactly where he was, stock-still, and didn't move a muscle.
The fighting ended by late afternoon.
The alien warship appeared to be maneuvering for a decisive strike from its onboard weapons. Bella signaled Natasha to cover for her, then let her eyes go unfocused, projecting a thread of psionic force outward—invisible, dimensionless, narrow as a needle. It threaded through multiple energy shields and delivered a direct kill on the Xerun commander.
After that, Charlie shouldered a Stinger missile launcher and took down the entire alien command ship in a single shot.
Their tally on this side was substantial: over fifty Xerun killed, and one command ship downed.
The Xerun operated something like a hive structure, with the command ship functioning as the queen. Take down the queen, and the drones—brains mostly water, rattling with every step—went catatonic. Whatever intelligence they had was borrowed from the rear command; without it, they were barely functional.
Globally, the Xerun had deployed only twenty command ships. Knocking one down with a group of "survivors" was nothing short of extraordinary.
Unfortunately, they were about ten minutes too late to be first.
Ten minutes earlier, on the Santa Monica front in Los Angeles, a Marine staff sergeant named Benjamin Asher had coordinated with Air Force fighters to bring down a Xerun command ship—the first one in the world. He'd immediately broadcast the vulnerability to every nation: take out the command ships and the rest of the Xerun collapsed.
Asher was active military, Marine Corps, with direct Air Force support in the action. Dressed up a little, that became a story about the Pentagon's brilliant tactical direction.
Charlie was a cop. How was he supposed to compete with that narrative?
His achievement was quietly absorbed into the Pentagon's accounting—swallowed by Asher's prior success and logged in the official report as: command ships destroyed, +1. One line in a spreadsheet.
"Mr. Swan, please believe me—I'm going to make sure command knows what actually happened here." Sam Wilson thought the military's behavior was ugly, and he came by personally to say so.
Charlie was the kind of man who'd been content in a small-town posting for eighteen years. Fame and credit had never figured much into his math. His wife, his kids, a quiet life—that was all he'd ever really wanted. This didn't bother him.
He told Sam as much, and said a few kind words on top of it. Sam himself had acquitted himself well in the action, though he still ranked below Asher in the official accounting. Command had decided to make Asher the face of the victory; a rescue-mission paratrooper wasn't part of that story.
Charlie didn't mind. Samantha was busy with the baby. Bella and Natasha had no interest in the spotlight. The whole thing was laid to rest quickly and quietly.
After Los Angeles and San Francisco, the rest of the world mobilized.
They didn't have Asher's luck, and they didn't have Bella's psionics. But with enough fighters, tanks, and soldiers, they steadily pushed back the invaders in their own territories.
Many of the remaining Xerun vanished into the deep ocean and were never seen again—as if they'd never come at all.
Human forces officially accounted for seven or eight alien ships. The rest were declared destroyed by heroic American forces in the government's public statements.
Bella didn't believe a word of the official account. The Xerun were weak, but not that weak. After forty-plus hours of fighting across multiple fronts, the idea that they all disappeared within thirty minutes strained credulity.
"They actually just... vanished?" she asked Natasha.
As a Level Five agent, Natasha now held a mid-level position at S.H.I.E.L.D. — just high enough to access certain things that weren't for public consumption. And Bella was hardly an outsider.
Natasha passed her the tablet. "Internal intel. Don't go spreading it."
Bella greatly appreciated S.H.I.E.L.D.'s colander-like approach to information security. Hydra sees this stuff. Why shouldn't I? She took the tablet and read carefully.
What she found: the Xerun had initially been drawing sea water, as reported. Then a mass of dark shapes erupted from beneath the ocean. They had hard scales and razor claws, and they tore the aliens apart.
Fish-people. A huge number of them.
Several of the video clips were low-resolution and shaky. She went through them one by one. A five-second clip caught her attention.
Xerun extracting sea water—then massive tentacles surging up from the deep. In the time it took to blink, the scavenger aliens were gone.
She knew those tentacles.
Even through a screen, even at a glance, she could feel the dense, oppressive malice radiating from them.
Calypso—merged with a sea monster. And she was close.